Ideas and technology and politics and journalism and history and humor and some other stuff.
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some asshole stole my iphone and I’m selling my appendix, i figured i have no use for it so might as well sell it. im 21 young and beautiful, so my appendix is healthy and in great condition. we can also do a trade off, my appendix for your iphone 4s…the phone has to be in a good condition, im not taking a crappy phone for my beautiful and healthy appendix.
From a 1967 Paris Review interview conducted by Maggie Paley, Terry Southern discussing his first screenwriting job, on a little film called Dr. Strangelove:
“Terry Southern
It was the first time in my life that I’d gone anywhere with a sense of purpose. I mean, I’d always traveled, I’d made about ten trips back and forth, but just aimless, with no justification except having the G.I. Bill and using it as a means to be there. It was the first time I’d gone anywhere and been paid for it. It was very satisfying, very interesting, and almost unbelievable to be moving about like that.
Stanley himself is a strange kind of genius. I’d always had a notion that people in power positions in movies must be hacks and fools, and it was very impressive to meet someone who wasn’t. He thinks of himself as a ‘filmmaker’—his idol is Chaplin—and so he’s down on the idea of ‘director.’ He would like, and it’s understandable, to have his films just say, ‘A Film by Stanley Kubrick.’ He tries to cover the whole thing from beginning to end. Including the designing of the ads. He’s probably the only American director who works on big-budget pictures who has complete control of his movies.
Interviewer:
Strangelove was originally conceived as a melodrama, not a comedy. Did you work with Kubrick to restructure the whole thing, or were you able to just insert the jokes?
Terry Southern:
I knew what he wanted. It was a question of working together, rewriting each line, and changing the tone.
Interviewer:
When you started the project, you’d never written movie dialogue. You presumably didn’t know anything about how to write a screenplay.
Terry Southern:
Yes, I knew, because I like movies. And writing dialogue has always been easy for me.”
The folks at Pitch Perfect PR sent me a reminder that Andy Kaufman and His Grandmother, the otherworldy comic’s posthumous (and first!) LP, which I told you about back in May, is now available. It’s sort of Andy’s ode to the Internet, which he made in a time before the Internet existed. Typical for him. You can purchase it at the Drag City site–although it looks to be already sold out there–or you can buy it at Amazon. From an excellent Grantland piece about the album by Alex Pappademas:
“[Lynne Margulies] Osgood was Kaufman’s last girlfriend. They met in 1983 when Osgood, as Lynne Margulies, played a small role in the low-budget feature My Breakfast With Blassie, a mostly improvised My Dinner With Andre parody in which Kaufman eats and talks with the pro wrestler ‘Classy’ Freddie Blassie at a Sambo’s coffee shop in Los Angeles.
They lived together, and after Kaufman died, Osgood — now an artist and teacher who lives on the Oregon coast — held on to his stuff, including the tapes he’d made in the ’70s. In 2009, she published a book of letters written to Kaufman by women who wanted to wrestle him, titled Dear Andy Kaufman: I Hate Your Guts!; through that book’s publisher, Process Media’s Jodi Wille, she met Dan Koretzy, cofounder of the Chicago indie-rock label Drag City. Osgood sat with Koretzky at a Starbucks in Los Angeles and played him some of the tapes. This week, Drag City and Process Media jointly released the first-ever Andy Kaufman comedy album, Andy and His Grandmother, a collection of bits culled from Kaufman’s cassette archives by writer/producer Vernon Chatman and Rodney Ascher, the director of the Stanley Kubrick conspiracy-theory documentary Room 237. The plummy, solemn Bill Kurtis–esque narration is by Saturday Night Live alum Bill Hader; Kaufman’s friend and creative coconspirator Bob Zmuda contributes liner notes.
Posthumously assembled albums of any kind tend to be a crapshoot, even with confidants and superfans in the mix, and comedy albums don’t always capture that which is remarkable about the comics who make them. Plus, pure audio doesn’t seem like the optimal delivery system for a performer like Kaufman, whose act was so visual and televisual and depended so much on gestures and the look on Kaufman’s placid David Berkowitz face. And yet Andy and His Grandmother is a landmark. It passes the basic comedy-album test in that it’s often quite funny. At one point, Andy chats up some hookers from his car; when they offer him a date, he suggests bowling or roller skating, and when they realize he’s just goofing around and start to walk away, he calls after them, ‘What kind of work do you do?’ But as always with Kaufman’s work, the jokes aren’t the most important thing about it. The most important thing about it is Kaufman. You don’t come away from the record feeling like you know him, necessarily, but you feel like you’ve actually met him for the first time. Turns out he’s weird.”
Tags: Alex Pappademas, Andy Kaufman, Bill Hader, Bob Zmuda, Dan Koretzy, Jodi Wille, Lynne Margulies Osgood, Rodney Ascher, Vernon Chatman
“The policemen were wondering if hypnotism had anything to do with successful checker playing.”
An amateur hypnotist who was very good at checkers had quite an interesting day, according to an article in the November 15, 1904 New York Times. The story:
“David Hermann, a clothing cutter, of 76 Seventh Street, who believes he is a hypnotist, early yesterday morning aroused his father, two brothers, and sister before daylight, and sought to put them to sleep again. They had endured a pet notion of Hermann’s that he could hypnotize prize fighters and thus make a lot of money by placing bets the right way, but they balked at being robbed of their sleep, as a consequence he was put in charge of the police of the Fifth Street Station.
All day yesterday Hermann had the freedom the station’s lounging room. He began to ingratiate himself by beating Quinn, the doorman, three games of checkers. Quinn being the second-best player attached to the station, it was thought best to give the hypnotist prisoner a thorough tryout, and word was sent to Policeman Snyder, who lives a few doors away, to come and try an opponent worthy of the effort.
Snyder responded and was beaten two games. The policemen then telephoned for John Russell, a Bellevue ambulance driver, who was off duty. Russell sat down full of confidence, being the one man admitted by the station force to show to be Snyder’s master. Russell was beaten three successive games.
The policemen were talking about it and wondering if hypnotism had anything to do with successful checker playing when the ambulance arrived to take Hermann to Bellevue Hospital.
On the way there Dr. Parsons had the ambulance stop at 366 East Sixteenth Street, for another patient, Charles Dressler. When the vehicle resumed its trip Dressler became violent. Dr. Parsons was unable to control him, and the driver had to assist.
Their combined efforts were of little avail, and Dr. Parsons was about to call for police aid when when Hermann got busy with a variety of strange movements of his arms and hands over Dressler’s head. Dressler became quiet, and the trip was resumed without trouble. Hermann making his over the latter sought to make trouble.
At the hospital Dressler was removed from the ambulance without difficulty, but Hermann refused to budge until a checker board and a set of checkers were used as a lure. Hermann then followed the man who carried the bait into the psychopathic ward.”
Tags: Charles Dressler, David Hermann, John Russell, Policeman Snyder, Quinn the doorman
I’m sure Google would love if Glass and the company’s still-developing driverless-car software became ubiquitous, but Jeremy Fisher makes a good point at Medium: Even if another company invents a more popular version of those things, the search leader stands to profit. From Fisher’s essay:
“No matter who brings the rest of the world online, develops the first breakout wearable computer, or perfects the self-driving car, chances are good it’s Google we’ll be using while we sand-surf across the Sahara towed by a driverless automobile. You can–and companies will–try changing the default option and giving preference to another service, as Apple did when it replaced Google Maps, but that’s worked out poorly in the past.
Google’s investment in these technologies can be seen as part of a shaping strategy aimed at increasing aggregate global online time. Glass spurs Apple to develop the iWatch/iBand, which spurs Samsung…Loon spurs Safaricom…and so on. From this perspective, it’s possible that Google agrees with its critics: It’s all good, as long as someone invents the next iPhone. If these projects can make that happen faster, they will have proved a wise investment.”
Tags: Jeremy Fisher
The opening of Alan Durning’s Slate piece in praise of the so-called flophouse, the cheap and tiny living quarters which used to be a staple of every major American metropolis, and are, perhaps, making a comeback:
“Most Americans live in houses or apartments that they own or rent. But a century ago, other less expensive choices were just as common: renting space in families’ homes, for example, or living in residential hotels, which once ranged from live-in palace hotels for the business elite to bunkhouses for day laborers. Working-class rooming houses, with small private bedrooms and shared bathrooms down the hall, were particularly numerous, forming the foundation of affordable housing in North American cities. Misguided laws and regulations almost wiped out these other kinds of housing, with disastrous consequences, but now there’s a chance for them to come back, helping those who are young, single, or on the lower rungs of our increasingly unequal society.
In the early decades of the 20th century, rooming houses offered affordable housing for America’s urban working class. Some offered boarding, with a kitchen and dining hall in the basement. In San Francisco a century ago, a passable room might cost 35 cents a night ($8 in today’s currency). Concentrated near downtowns, rooming houses and other forms of residential hotels provided quintessentially urban living. The dense mixture of accommodations with affordable eateries, laundries, billiard halls, saloons, and other retail establishments made life convenient on foot and on slim budgets.
The past century of rising affluence started the decline of the rooming house. With higher incomes, we bought more space and privacy. Young, upwardly mobile, enterprising residents moved out of hotels, depriving hotel districts of their best customers. Those left behind were harder to employ, poorer, on the wrong side of the law, or simply eccentric. This trend accelerated in the 1960s and 1970s, when authorities deinstitutionalized many people with mental illnesses and began sheltering them in rooming houses and other cheap hotels. In most cases, mental health authorities intended such arrangements to be temporary. Some planned to build and support constellations of small, neighborhood-based care facilities, for example, but not-in-my-backyard politics intervened. The care facilities never got built, and some of society’s most vulnerable were stranded in rooming houses, which by then had come to be known as single-room occupancy hotels (SROs).
Meanwhile, new state and local laws made residential hotels more expensive to operate. Other rules simply made them illegal outside of historic downtowns. As cities expanded outward, rooming houses could not spread to the new neighborhoods.
The rules were not accidents.” (Thanks Browser.)
Tags: Alan Durning
Babe Ruth’s jockstrap, that season he contracted syphilis.
The chorus girls in Cleveland are particularly ridden with disease.
Oh sure, we’ll all be famous for 15 minutes in the future–and the future is now–but it will never be enough, never be more than a fleeting illusion. Changes in technology gave us the selfie, but why did we accept it? It might seem like it makes the world more egalitarian, like every one is a star, but it mostly just distracts from true inequities. From Elizabeth Day’s Guardian piece about the rise of the selfie:
“Although photographic self-portraits have been around since 1839, when daguerreotype pioneer Robert Cornelius took a picture of himself outside his family’s store in Philadelphia (whether he had the help of an assistant is not known), it was not until the invention of the compact digital camera that the selfie boomed in popularity. There was some experimentation with the selfie in the 1970s – most notably by Andy Warhol – when the Polaroid camera came of age and freed amateur photographers from the tyranny of the darkroom. But film was expensive and it wasn’t until the advent of digital that photographs became truly instantaneous.
The fact that we no longer had to traipse to our local chemist to develop a roll of holiday snaps encouraged us to experiment – after all, on a digital camera, the image could be easily deleted if we didn’t like the results. A selfie could be done with the timer button or simply by holding the camera at arm’s length, if you didn’t mind the looming tunnel of flesh dog-earing one corner of the image.
As a result, images tagged as #selfie began appearing on the photo-sharing website Flickr as early as 2004. But it was the introduction of smartphones – most crucially the iPhone 4, which came along in 2010 with a front-facing camera – that made the selfie go viral. According to the latest annual Ofcom communications report, 60% of UK mobile phone users now own a smartphone and a recent survey of more than 800 teenagers by the Pew Research Centre in America found that 91% posted photos of themselves online – up from 79% in 2006.
Recently, the Chinese manufacturer Huawei unveiled plans for a new smartphone with ‘instant facial beauty support’ software which reduces wrinkles and blends skin tone.”
Selfie.
Tags: Elizabeth Day
Many middle-aged white women in America have become increasingly addicted to OxyContin and other pain medications in the last decade. It hasn’t only spiked the number of overdoses in white women of a certain age, but it could possibly lead them to being accident-prone drivers or perhaps stealing to support their habit. And if they have trouble doctor-shopping, maybe they are buying street drugs which leads to a black market and violence.
Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker is a white woman in that age group. She should be profiled not only by police who hope to reduce illicit drug purchases but also by armed civilians in cars who pursue her while she’s on foot. She is naturally a suspect because of how she looks. Perhaps those are just Skittles in her bag, but who knows? Maybe she’s wandering around your neighborhood looking for her dealer. According to Kathleen Parker’s reasoning, it’s just common sense that she be stopped and frisked, that other citizens must stand their ground.
From her latest column:
“The point is that this is one of those rare instances in which everyone is right within his or her own experience. African Americans are right to perceive that Martin was followed because he was black, but it is wrong to presume that recognizing a racial characteristic is necessarily racist. It has been established that several burglaries in Zimmerman’s neighborhood primarily involved young black males.
Picture Zimmerman’s neighbor Olivia Bertalan, a defense witness, hiding in her locked bedroom with her infant and a pair of rusty scissors while two young males, later identified as African American, burglarized her home. They ran when police arrived.
This is not to justify what subsequently transpired between Zimmerman and Martin but to cast a dispassionate eye on reality. And no, just because a few black youths caused trouble doesn’t mean all black youths should be viewed suspiciously. This is so obvious a truth that it shouldn’t need saying and yet, if we are honest, we know that human nature includes the accumulation of evolved biases based on experience and survival. In the courtroom, it’s called profiling. In the real world, it’s called common sense.”
Tags: Kathleen Parker
From the May 18, 1893 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Montreal–The following details have been received here of the story of cannibalism reported briefly yesterday.
Last fall the members of an Indian tribe called the Nasconopis started out for their winter hunt around the river St. Marguerite, below Quebec. Among the party was a man named Jacks and his daughter, aged 16. The hunt proved a failure, the party hastened to return as quickly as possible and, after enduring hardships and starvation, its members finally reached a point in the wilderness some sixty miles distant from their homes.
Weak and famished, without a morsel to eat, they were in a desperate condition. The father of the girl resolved to sacrifice her to preserve his own life, and one morning when his companions were nearly frozen with the cold, he killed the daughter and appeased the hunger. Horror stricken his companions fled, refusing to take the miserable man with them, and at last accounts he had not yet made his appearance in the settlement. The probabilities are that if he has survived he is keeping away from the settlement on account of the crime.”
Tags: Jacks, Jacks' Daughter
From MIT’s Technology Review, a list of the ten most controversial subjects on the English-language Wikipedia:
“That gives a simple list of the most controversial articles in each language. In English, the top 10 most controversial articles are as follows:
“Plans for a free energy device – I can prove they’re mine.”
I’m selling:
It’s not a joke, it’s not a scam, I’m tired of red tape, I’m tired of not having enough money for research and development, and I am definitely tired of not having enough money to go to the doctor when I’m sick and hoping that it’s nothing serious. I’ve got gold here, but I don’t have the tools or the strength to mine it.
We’ll have our lawyers meet, draw up papers, and get it done. I’m asking $3,000,000.00 USD. For all this, for the movie deals that could follow, for the sales from the devices, this is a steal.
“Several ideas for erotic devices..”
Grandma’s funk, after several hours of target practice at the shooting range.
Who moved my cigarettes?
I set up a Facebook account once a couple years ago so that I could have a look around the site and see if I thought it was worth it. I didn’t think it was. In addition to allowing someone as dubious as Mark Zuckerberg to be controlling my Internet experience–owning it, really–I didn’t like the artifice of how people represented themselves. And I thought that maybe the past should be past. Maybe every day shouldn’t be a high school reunion and reconnecting to an earlier time shouldn’t be so easy. Maybe when destroying chronology is easier, progress is more difficult.
From “The New Too Big To Fail,” a Medium essay by Feroz Salam about a corporation that is often thought to be something more noble:
“More so than we ever did with the banks, we’ve bought into the myth of the gentle technology giants. There’s a long history of (sometimes unjustified) mistrust in finance, built on hundreds of years of its waxing and waning influence on world affairs. The technology companies are newer and friendlier entities, run by young ‘nerds’ who seem less threatening and more involved in apolitical technical engineering. In ‘Zuck’ we trust.
The eternal reality, of course, is that apoliticism is a myth. Google, Facebook et al. have increasingly had to grapple with social and political issues as the need to stay ethical come up against growth expectations. Google decided that it was OK to censor search results in China for a slice of the pie, and Facebook has had to frame a dubious ‘code of morals’ as to what’s permitted on its pages and what’s not. The entire lot of them have been press-ganged into providing on-demand personal data to the American government. In the interests of market share, Zuck, Sergei, and the rest of their merry crew have shown a cynical willingness to push their users under any bus that’s good for business.
As much as any nation-state, we now also belong to corporate sovereigns: Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and Google. Unfortunately, we have little say in how they are run and ultimately, our own naive enthusiasm is to blame for placing so much of our information where we have no control over it. What’s worse is how completely we have bought into a system where we abide by the arbitrary morals of our new technocratic overlords.
As with the financial crisis, we have to admit our old model of privacy is broken.”
Tags: Feroz Salam
Wilhelm Reich, part-time cloudbuster and the likely inspiration for Woody Allen’s Orgasmatron, is the rich subject of a historical piece at Vice by Jason Louv. The opening:
“It was the greatest incidence of scientific persecution in American history.
In July of 1947, Dr. Wilhelm Reich—a brilliant but controversial psychoanalyst who had once been Freud’s most promising student, who had enraged the Nazis and the Stalinists as well as the psychoanalytic, medical, and scientific communities, who had survived two World Wars and fled to New York—was dying in a prison cell in Lewisberg, Pennsylvania, accused by the government of being a medical fraud engaged in a ‘sex racket.’
That ‘racket’ would one day be called the ‘sexual revolution.’ But it was still 1947 in America—an America not even ready for psychoanalysis, still a nascent science that Harper’s and the New Republic had categorized, right alongside Reich’s theories, as being no better than astrology. (Reich, Harper’s had decided, was the leader of a ‘new cult of sex and anarchy.’)
If the American public wasn’t ready for Dr. Freud, then how much less prepared would they be for Dr. Reich—a man who, at his Orgonon institute near Rangely, Maine, was researching the energetic force of the orgasm itself?
Reich had taken Freud’s theories far. Too far, according to the FDA. Starting with Freud’s connection of sexual repression to neurosis, Reich had theorized that it was the physical inability to surrender to orgasm that underlay neurosis, and eventually turned people to fascism and authoritarianism. Reich migrated from Freud’s simple talking cure to what he called character analysis, a therapy designed to help his patients overcome the physical and respiratory blocks that prevented them from experiencing pleasure. Finally—and most dangerously—he claimed that the orgasm was an expression of orgone, the joy-filled force of life itself. With phone-booth-size devices called ‘orgone accumulators’ he could harness this force to cure neurosis, disease, and even affect the weather and help crops grow.”
Tags: Jason Louv, Wilhelm Reich
A solitary man in Poughkeepsie dies of natural causes at the end of 2012, and the mystery of his wife’s disappearance from 30 years earlier is suddenly, startlingly solved. From Vivian Yee’s amazing New York Times article:
“The Nicholses’ house was like no other in the neighborhood. Ms. Nichols loved books, and nearly every room was filled with volumes from floor to ceiling. Mr. Nichols collected cameras, guns and books about the Civil War. Neighbors marveled at the tools and gadgets he had amassed through his job at I.B.M. and his evening shifts in the Sears hardware department, including six lawn mowers.
In their yard were parked two Amphicars, novelty vehicles that could drive on land and in water, of which only about 3,800 were ever produced. At a time when computers were still relatively unknown in regular homes, the Nicholses had several, lined up in a room off the living room where Mr. Nichols also kept a police and fire scanner running at all times.
‘They were a married couple,’ Ms. Darragh, now 62, said. ‘She was normal. He was not.’
Only to a next-door neighbor and close co-workers did Ms. Nichols hint that her husband’s oddities bothered her, too. She told Mary Jo Santagate, a teachers’ aide at her school, that she disliked the house’s clutter and wished that her husband had not kept their dead cat frozen in their refrigerator: she dreaded opening it to cook. She complained of having to hand her paycheck over to him each week.
When the couple’s only son, 25-year-old James Nichols III, drowned in 1982 after falling off the hood of one of the Amphicars in a Mississippi lake, she told Ms. Darragh she was upset that her husband had parked the same Amphicar in the driveway, a daily reminder of her grief.
‘Knowing her, she tolerated it because she didn’t have the wherewithal to tell him to knock it off or I’m going to leave,’ Ms. Santagate said.”
Tags: James Nichols, JoAnn Nichols, Vivian Yee
“It is asserted that the women occupants were thrown out to be devoured by the animals.”
Starving wolves crossed tracks with a wedding party traveling on sleds in snowy St. Petersburg in what feels like a ferocious folktale but was reported as fact in an article in the March 19, 1911 New York Times. The story:
St. Petersburg — Tragic details of the fate of a wedding party attacked by wolves in Asiatic Russia while driving on sledges to the bride’s house, where a banquet was to have taken place, are now at hand, and in their ghastly reality surpass anything ever imagined by a fiction writer.
The exceptionally severe weather has been the cause of many minor tragedies in which the wolves have played a part, but perhaps none has ever been known so terrible as that now reported, since in this instance no fewer than 118 persons are said to have perished.
A wedding party numbering 120 persons set out in thirty sledges to drive twenty miles from the village of Obstipoff to Tashkend.
The ground was thickly covered with snow, and the progress was necessarily delayed, but the greater part of the journey was accomplished in safety.
At a distance of a few miles from Tashkend the horses suddenly became restive, and the speculation of the travelers changed to horror when they discerned a black cloud moving rapidly toward them across the snowfield.
Its nearer approach showed it to be composed of hundreds of wolves, yelping furiously, and evidently frantic with hunger, and within a few seconds the hindmost sledges were surrounded.
Panic seized the party, and those in the van whipped up the horses and made desperate attempts to escape, regardless of their companions, but the terrified horses seemed almost incapable of movement.
A scene frightful almost beyond description was now enacted. Men, women and children, shrieking with fear, defended themselves with whatever weapons they could, but to no avail, and one after another fell amidst the snarling beasts.
The wolves, roused still further by the taste of blood, rushed toward the leading sledges, and though the first dozen conveyances managed to stave them off for a time, it was only at a terrible cost, since it is asserted that the women occupants were thrown out to be devoured by the animals.
The pursuit, however, never slackened, and the carnage went on until only the foremost sledge–that containing the bride and the bridegroom–remained beyond the wolves’ reach.
A nightmare race was kept up for a few hundred yards, and it seemed as though the danger was being evaded, when suddenly a fresh pack of wolves appeared.
The two men accompanying the bridal couple demanded that the bride should be sacrificed, but the bridegroom indignantly rejected the cowardly proposition, whereupon the men seized and overpowered the pair and threw them out to a horrible fate.
Then they succeeded in rousing their horses to a last effort, and, though attacked in turn, beat off the wolves and eventually reached Tashkend, the only two survivors of the happy party which had set out from Obstipoff.
Both men were in a semi-demented state from their experience.•
You know how sometimes when a dictator comes to power, the previous leader of the nation is “disappeared” from sight, not just physically but even airbrushed from photos? Not only can people be scrubbed from history but so can truth.
If you look at the front page of the Huffington Post right now, you’ll see a headline that reads:”The View Makes Extremely Controversial Choice,” which refers you to a story by Katherine Fung about Jenny McCarthy being hired as a new talking head for Barbara Walters’ show. The brief piece contains the following sentence:
“McCarthy has guest hosted the show eight times. Her appointment, though, is not without criticism about her controversial views on vaccinations and autism.”
What the story unfortunately doesn’t mention is that the Huffington Post played a large role in McCarthy having a platform to disseminate her fearmongering. In fact, there was a time when McCarthy was all but the de facto medical writer for the site, using bad science and no science to repeatedly frighten parents from immunizing their children. When the main research she was using for her theories was proved to be falsified bunk, the Huffington Post even allowed McCarthy a rationalization of an exit story which she didn’t deserve.
I’m not accusing Fung of purposely omitting this vital fact. She’s probably a very young person who hasn’t been working for the Huffington Post for long and likely has no idea about the link. But there must be management people who have institutional memory and should not allow the publication a divorce of convenience from the facts. Similarly, the second link, which takes you to a story at Salon about McCarthy’s past, doesn’t mention the HuffPo role in the debacle. I’m not saying Salon purposely elided the connection because of what seems to be a working relationship between the two sites, but it is reason to pause. (Scroll down to the bottom of that very Salon page and you’ll see all manner of Huffington Post editorial links.) Salon did at one time call out the Huffington Post on such things.
I’m not someone who hates Arianna Huffington. I think she’s basically a good person. But she and her management team made a terrible mistake in allowing McCarthy to publish her pseudo-science and the Huffington Post shouldn’t “forget” its role in that sad campaign.•
When performance-enhancing drugs are used every day by the average person–and that will happen–it won’t be possible to hold athletes accountable anymore. A section from a provocative post by Julian Savulescu at Practical Ethics which was inspired by runner Tyson Gay’s recent failed drug tests
“We reached the limits of human performance in sprinting about 20 years ago. To keep improving, to keep beating records, to continue to train at the peak of fitness, to recover from the injury that training inflicts, we need enhanced physiology. Spectators want faster times and broken records, so do athletes. We have exhausted the human potential.
Is it wrong to aim for zero tolerance and performances which are within natural human limits? No, but it is not enforceable.
The strongest argument against doping is safety. The harm inflicted on East German athletes must never be repeated. But anything is dangerous if taken to excess. Water will kill you if you drink enough. As sport has shown over last 20 years, performance enhancers can be administered safely. They could be administered yet more safely if it was brought out into the open.
Of course there is no such thing as risk-free sport. But we need a balance between safety, enforceability, and spectacle. Elite sport itself is fundamentally unsafe, as Team Sky’s Edvald Boassen Hagen and Geraint Thomas, both nursing fractures from recent cycling crashes can tell you. It was entirely appropriate to enforce the wearing of helmets to limit the safety risks. But it would be inappropriate to limit the race to only straight, wide roads, or to remove downhill racing or to take any number of other measures that would increase safety but ruin the sport as a spectacle and as a cultural practice. It would be a waste of time to take other measures, such as limiting the amount of time or the speed that riders can train at, even on the grounds of safety. It could not be enforced.
Enforceability requires a reasonable limits.“
Tags: Julian Savulescu
From “Culturalism, Gladwell and Airplane Crashes,” an Ask a Korean! essay which pushes back in general at the idea of blaming plane crashes on the ethnicity of the pilot and specifically on Malcolm Gladwell’s ideas on the topic:
“Gladwell’s Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes goes like this: in landing an airplane, especially in tough circumstances (such as bad weather, older aircraft, etc.,) communication within the piloting crew is critically important. When signs of danger appear, at least one of the two or three pilots in the cockpit must spot such signs and alert the others. Certain cultures, however, have characteristics within them that make such communication more difficult. For example, some culture expects greater deference to authority than others. This leads to a situation in which a lower-ranking pilot hesitates to communicate the danger signs to the higher ranking pilot. Some culture employs a manner of speech that is indirect and suggestive, rather than direct and imperative. This leads to a situation in which one pilot merely suggests the danger signs to another pilot, when a more urgent approach may be necessary.
Gladwell uses the 1997 Korean Air crash to illustrate this point. In 1997, Korean Air Line Flight 801, a Boeing 747 jet, crash-landed Guam, killing 225 of the 254 on board. The accident occurred because, in a bad weather, the captain relied on a malfunctioning equipment to assess the plane’s position, and believed the airplane was closer to the airport than it actually was. As the plane was approaching the ground, six seconds before the impact, the first officer and the flight engineer noticed first that the airport was not in sight. Both called for the captain to raise up the plane again, and the captain did attempt to do so. But it was too late: Flight 801 rammed into a hill, three miles before it reached the airport.
How did Korean culture figure into this situation? Gladwell first notes that in Korean culture, there is a respect for hierarchy. Gladwell also notes that Korean manner of speaking is indirect and suggestive, requiring the listener to be engaged and applying proper context to understand the true meaning. This is particularly so when a lower-ranked person addresses the higher-ranked person: to express deference, the lower-ranked person speaks indirectly rather than directly.
According to Gladwell, Flight 801’s first officer and flight engineer noticed a problem long before six seconds prior to the crash. Gladwell claims that more than 25 minutes before the crash, the first officer and the flight engineer noticed the danger signs and attempted to communicate to the captain–indirectly. But because the captain was tired, he was not properly engaged to understand the true intent of what the first officer and the flight engineer said. Gladwell claims that the first officer and the flight engineer finally spoke up directly with six seconds to go before the crash, and still did not do enough to challenge the captain. As Gladwell puts it, “in the crash investigation, it was determined that if [the first officer] had seized control of the plane in that moment [six seconds before the crash], there would have been enough time to pull the nose and clear Nimitz Hill.”
What is wrong with this story?” (Thanks All Things D.)
We are going to get the blueprint for the Hyperloop. my greatest tech obsession, on August 12, according to Elon Musk’s Twitter account.
Will publish Hyperloop alpha design by Aug 12. Critical feedback for improvements would be much appreciated.
Tags: Elon Musk
A pig farmer who just committed a bestial act behind a filling station.
We are to be betrothed.
Sky Deutschland has created “The Talking Window,” a technology which uses bone conduction to broadcast messages directly into weary train travelers’ heads when they lean them against the glass. These will be your new dreams.
“Before she dies, she has a will drawn up in which she wills a man to her best friend.”
My novel entitled, Diva On My Doorstep, was published in April of 2010. Since that time, it has been written into a screenplay. The screenplay was written by a professional screenwriter. I am looking to sell the screenplay. This would make for an excellent feature film or a made for TV movie.
A brief synopsis is as follows:
Holly Madsen is marrying the man of her dreams–only he doesn’t know it and neither does she.
Why? Because the heroine’s best friend of my completed novel, Diva on My Doorstep, learns she has terminal cancer and before she dies she is determined to fix the relationship problems in her best friend’s life. Before she dies, she has a will drawn up in which she wills a man to her best friend. People have inherited many things, but a man, well that makes for some interesting conversation. Set in New York City and later Perry, Maine, the character-driven story is a 97,852 word romance. The story brings two people together, against their will, who couldn’t be more perfect for one another.
It will appeal to mainstream hopeless romantics, as well as those who enjoy a good story, a good laugh, a few tears, and a happy ending.
Meet Holly Madsen, a 36-year-old dog food heiress who has everything, or so it seems. She is on again, off again and now back on again to marry her cheating fiané, Daniel. She is two breaths away from saying “I do.” Holly and her best friend Gina go on what was supposed to be Holly and Daniel’s honeymoon before the first wedding was called off. Gina then proceeds to win a couple of free trips in which Holly must accompany her on. Gina takes Holly to different ends of the earth hoping she’ll meet someone who will treat her right so she can be done with her player fiancé, Daniel, once and for all.
Holly’s plastic surgery addicted, grandchild-deprived mother is in constant search of a husband for her daughter. She cannot bear the fact that she has a 36 year old drop dead gorgeous daughter who isn’t married, let alone isn’t pregnant. Holly’s mother, Rochelle, sends a very eligible Dr. Steven Mancini over to Holly’s for a blind date. One small problem — she didn’t inform Holly.
Steven is charming, funny and handsome and turns Holly’s world upside down. He is perfect for her. But the whole thing is too good to be true. He has a secret that Holly comes to discover and it sends her catapulting back into the arms of her fiancé and down the aisle.
Gina hears wedding bells herself and makes an announcement that will have a life-changing effect on Holly and Steven. She vowed to always protect Holly’s heart from breaking and now she’s going to seal the deal once and for all.
“Meet Holly Madsen, a 36-year-old dog food heiress who has everything, or so it seems.”
When do we start filming?
“His face is intelligent and his head well shaped, but not abnormal.”
In the classic photograph above, the eventual chess grandmaster (and accountant) Samuel Reshevsky shows his prodigious skills for the game by squaring off simultaneously against 20 excellent adult players in France. The following article from the May 18, 1920 New York Times records the day’s events:
“Paris–Twenty graybeards sitting in a square played chess yesterday in Paris against a very small boy 8 years old, and he beat them all. Among the graybeards were some of the best players in France, and one at least, whose boast is that he drew with Capablanca, the Pan-American chess champion, but all their reputation availed them nothing against a frail child with a pale, thoughtful face, who moved quietly from one board to another, reducing their most skillful plans and wiles to nothingness and mating them when they least expected it.
Samuel Rzeschewski is the name of the prodigy. He was born near Lodz, in his father, himself a well known player, showed him the moves. For the paternal dignity the lesson was unfortunate. Within a fortnight Samuel was giving his father such beatings that to equalize things he had to give him a rook and another piece.
Yesterday at the Pavillon de la Rotonde, against twenty of the best players of the Palais Royal Society, his victory was complete. Wearing a blue sailor suit, he stood alone in the square of tables and faced unperturbed his graybeard and bald antagonists. His face is intelligent and his head well shaped, but not abnormal. Only the gravity of his face showed that he was not any ordinary 8-year-old going to play ‘hunt the thimble’ with an assembly of grandfathers.
Stepping quickly from one board to another, he spent little time on his moves. He seemed to see at once the weakness of his opponents’ play. Once or twice, when one of them had moved foolishly, his brows contracted in a disapproving frown. For half a minute at most he stood in front of each board, whistling through his teeth, then moved decisively and left his opponent puzzling uselessly how to counter the attack. In the end every one of the men was soundly trounced.
From here Samuel is going to London to complete his conquest of Europe, and then his father says he must retire from public life and begin his education, which has been sadly neglected during the war.”
Reshevsky, in 1968.
